Author/s : Klaus Förster, Bernd Öggl
Publisher : Addison-Wesley Professional
Category :
Web design, HTML and JavaScript
Review by : Rob Spoor
Rating : 8 horseshoes
After an uninteresting itroduction (do we really care about all the meetings that lead to HTML5?), the book finally starts with why I got it - all the new features! Starting with semantics, the new form input elements and audio/video, the book contains a very lengthy chapter on the new canvas; 71 of the 290 pages are dedicated to this subject. This is caused by all the images, code snippets and, well, many features of the canvas. It's quite an impressive and overwhelming chapter.
After that lengthy chapter you get the complete opposite in the SVG and MathML chapter. There are just 5 pages, and they don't really cover much, stating that these topics require books of their own. This chapter could and should have been omitted.
Next are some more interesting chapters about geolocation, web / offline storage, web sockets, web workers and microdata, to end with a catch-all chapter with all the remaining stuff the authors wanted to mention. Although there are nice features in it, but the chapter feels incoherent.
All in all it's a good book that describes quite a bit of new features. Just don't expect a full reference of what HTML5 does and does not have. Also, be prepared to read a lot of JavaScript. If you don't know it, several chapters are going to be hard to understand.
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Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in
exchange for writing this review on behalf of CodeRanch.
More info at Amazon.com